The Fastest Graphics Cards of 2003. Page 35

Quite a lot of people buy hardware and software to play with during the upcoming holidays late this month. Some buy consoles, some get new games, others acquire new graphics cards. This review will help you to choose between 9 premier graphics cards based on VPUs and GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA in 16 benchmarks representing performance in past, present and upcoming 3D games! In addition to benchmarks, we have market analysis for you.

3D Performance: Simulators

The next type of gaming applications includes those representing an exact (or not very exact) simulator of some means of transportation, military or civil. These games have the specifics of their own. In particular, the remarkable thing about all airplane-simulators is the presence of two huge textures in any frame: the sky and the ground, and the models are all designed with the highest quality and obey the major laws of physics. Something like that is also typical of auto-simulators, too, however, in this case anisotropic filtering matter much more, because it is responsible for the quality of the road moving under the car wheels. We believe that we selected two most suitable games of all the today’s simulators: the airplane-simulator from the times of World War II aka IL-2 Shturmovik: Forgotten Battles, and formula 1 race car simulator aka F1 Challenge 99-02. IL-2 Shturmovik: Forgotten Battles seems to be the best game of the kind so far: the airplane models are designed in the most thorough and detailed way and the image quality makes you forget that it is just a game and carries you away into the air battles where the radars and rocket launchers with laser targeting do not matter that much, and its is only the pilot’s skills and experience that help you get through to the sacred victory.

IL-2 Shturmovik: Forgotten Battles

For our tests we selected one of the heaviest records called TheBlackDeath.ntrk that is why you shouldn’t be surprised with these low fps rates. In the heavyweights class RADEON 9800 XT and 9800 PRO manage to get slightly ahead of the rivals from NVIDIA. Moreover, the latter is only 1fps behind the leader in 1024x768. The performance of RADEON 9500 PRO is probably ruined by the low memory working frequency, because its results are even lower than those of RADEON 9600 XT/PRO. As for GeForce FX, it feels OK in this game due to fast graphics memory (remember we mentioned large textures when we described the tests?). It is really surprising but in 1024x768 GeForce FX 5700 Ultra manages to outperform its faster brothers, though only by 2fps.